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Ellen Tanner Marsh writes:Is there a reason why you should buy this book - of Dickensian length, by a first time novelist, on a subject of admittedly narrow appeal: the sport of motocross? Indeed, there are several reasons, because author Lee O'Dea has leapt over a multitude of apparent hurdles to make his book, The Motocross Conformist, succeed. The story centers on protagonist Tom Detersis, a motocross promoter whose objective is to transform the sport into an enterprise with as much mass appeal as football. To say this, however, is to speak narrowly of what turns out to be a very remarkable tale. To describe it more accurately, The Motocross Conformist is about a tragic hero, consumed by visions of the American Dream, ultimately driven to violence for what he presumes are justifiable reasons. The story opens with Tom Detersis about to make the fateful decision to shoot the son of his antagonist from high school days, and then cuts back to the story proper, beginning in Tom's childhood when his father leaves his mother for another woman. As in a classic bildungsroman, the story follows Tom through childhood and into maturity, wherein Tom becomes a motocross racer and then, after injury ends his career, a promoter of the sport. In this role, Tom finds himself caught in a political tug-of-war between the sportsmen, who see only material aspects in his attempts to increase corporate and media interest, and the environmentalists, who view the sport with disdain and work to place restrictions upon it. In O'Dea's own words, Detersis is "an outsider in a world of outsiders," an archetypal character of fiction; he is Hamlet, he is Gatsby. O'Dea handles both his narrative and characters skillfully, developing plot, motivation, and intrigue slowly but inexorably from page to page so that The Motocross Conformist rises to a rare level in writing, wherein an ostensibly small subject becomes something grander, more universal - not motocross but the American Dream and the tragedy of individuals pushed to the limits of emotion by conflict. Seen in this light, readers will not only tolerate the length, but will appreciate the chance to linger in a world they may not have thought they wanted to inhabit. |